The Nieman Journalism Lab has posted another video segment on NBC News Digital Correspondent (and our alumna) Mara Schiavocampo. This segment details what Mara has in her toolkit to be prepared to air her coverage of events that could end up either online or on the evening news:
NBC’s Mara Schiavocampo: Inside her digital toolkit from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
See the profile here.
We’ve been expecting this so long it seems anticlimactic, even overdue.
The Christian Science Monitor announced today it will end its daily print edition and publish only on the Web, except for a new weekend print magazine. The 100-year-old newspaper claimed in a press release it will be the first national daily to substitute its Web site for its print edition when the change kicks in next April.
That may seem true now, but six months is a long time for an industry where circulation and revenue are in freefall. It would be surprising if more newspapers didn’t go Web-only by April.
CSM Magazine prototype
It’s a tough switcheroo to pull, as the Monitor’s finances demonstrate. Most of its revenue comes from the paper’s $219 annual subscription fee. It hopes to make up some of that lost money by recruiting subscribers to a new $89-a-year print magazine and –this is the big surprise — by recruiting Web readers to pay an undetermined subscription fee to receive a new digital version of the daily Monitor.
That is a gambit worth watching, for sure. But there is so much news available on the Web for free –at least for now –that almost any attempt to charge for a Web-based general news service seems doomed.
Apparently, somebody erroneously posted that Steve Jobs had a heart attack:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist
(As reported online by David DeBolt at the Chronicle of Higher Education)
According to Michigan State’s student newspaper, The State News, the university now lets prospective students finish their applications by creating personal videos in addition to their written statements. Applicants can upload their videos to public Web sites like YouTube and then send the clips to CollegeSupplement, a site that forwards videos to university admissions offices.
C-SPAN has constructed an interesting online tool this election season that chronicles the debates and breaks them down into easily digestable and interactive pieces. This site is a good example of how news orgs can make complex subjects and topics easier to digest. The site includes:
Check out the site at debatehub.c-span.org. Some screenshots after the jump. Read more…
With all the live-blogging, tweeting and video chat taking place online during Friday’s presidential debate, who could pay attention to TV?
OK, so most folks don’t sit in front of TV with their laptops and watch other people watching television, but that’s what I did while Barack Obama and John McCain verbally sparred in Mississippi on Friday night. I wanted to see how the Internet’s live political conversation might affect my perception of the televised debate.
So while listening to the candidates talk, I was clicking around the Web, watching citizens and professional journalists use live-blogging services like CoverItLive.com, video blogging services like Seesmic and text-messaging services like Twitter to share their thoughts on what the candidates were saying.
Pictured above is Seesmic
Hardly a satisfying way to experience a big moment in American political theater, I know. But it was strangely compelling, especially the video-blogging by people in their living rooms and home offices. Even some of those annoyingly short text updates from Twitter added a new dimension to my debate experience.
I confess I’m no fan of Twitter, the real-time “micro-blogging” service that lets people write often incomprehensible text messages of up to 140 characters and zap them to anyone who “subscribes” to their updates. And on Friday, most of the political “tweets” (web jargon for Twitter’s text updates) scrolling down the service’s special election page seemed obvious and trite. For example:
stephensays one of the things that scares me about mccain: he whistles when he speaks. a sign that a man is too old: he whistles when he speaks.
SignalToNoise Obama and McCain are very catty tonight.
mimiboo McCain’s tie is giving me a headache.
But as the debate wore on, this stream-of-consciousness reaction of strangers slowly added up to more than the sum of their individual comments. I had been looking for a new view of public opinion. What I found felt more like a multimedia party–where everyone was talking and hardly anyone was listening.
Here come the elephants, video cams and cell phones dangling from their trunks.
Images of multimedia elephants popped into my head as I sat listening to washingtonpost.com’s video guru conduct a workshop at the Online News Association annual conference this month. Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor for news video at the Post’s Web site, got me thinking about what news might be like if newspaper staffs not only survive, but start doing live video from urban streets all over the U.S.
Newspapers are the elephants of American news, with reporting staffs that vastly outnumber their TV and radio rivals. Even though the elephants have been put on a panic diet–with newspapers slashing staff and expenses to stay alive–the surviving herd is lumbering into video and other multimedia news formats. Rhodes, for example, has trained more than 200 Washington Post print reporters to shoot basic video, typically for 90-second visual sidebars to text stories. He’s planning to boost that output by teaching reporters the basics of editing so they can pre-edit in the field.
Radio Pictures – Oxymoron?
Yesterday I laughed when I got an e-mail from a videographer (and former colleague at washingtonpost.com) who now works at NPR, John Poole. He included a copy of the infamous New Yorker cartoon of a dog sitting in front of a computer, with “dog” crossed out in the caption. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a radio network,” it said. Poole included a link to his company’s new videos on iTunes, which led to this logo: “NPR’s Radio Pictures Podcast.” The tag line said NPR was offering “radio with a vision.”
Blogging is still like the early days of the ‘Net–mostly a good ole boys club. That much is obvious from the just-released State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which found that 66 percent of bloggers worldwide are male.
But some less obvious findings in this report from blog search engine Technorati interest me more. After all, the Internet population eventually lost its male dominance. So, too, will the blogging universe gain more women writers over time.
What surprised me about this survey of 1,209 bloggers is how much money some are making. The top 10 percent of bloggers are earning an average of $19,000 a year from their blogs, while the top one percent earn over $200,000 annually.
That doesn’t mean most blogs throw off much revenue, though. The median annual revenue for all U.S. bloggers with ads on their blogs is only $200, meaning half earn less. The higher, $19,000 average is skewed by top-tier bloggers who earn the really big bucks.
Slightly more than half of all blogs have advertising now, and most use self-serve tools from Google, Yahoo and others that automate the display of ads based on the text of their posts. Only 19 percent negotiate directly with advertisers, and six percent have a sales force.
Technorati, which monitors activity in millions of blogs, released the fifth and final chapter of its blogging report today. Overall, it shows blog growth slowing, and posting activity declining.
 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web |
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for inventing the World Wide Web (now known as just www.whatever), gave the keynote at the Knight Foundations’s Newseum shindig tonight for all its trustees and for its grantees from the Washington area (which included the Merrill College, of course).
But the real news? That Berners-Lee is starting something called the World Wide Web Foundation and Knight just gave him $5 million to get it going.
What is the Foundation? It’s Berners-Lee and others trying to again bring “humanity to humanity”–his initiative to start a platform for people, especially from developing and emerging countries, to figure out how information services can improve their lives.
Information matters to everyone, and Berners-Lee–and Knight–want to help people make connections. As Sarah Corbett has reported in the NY Times magazine: “as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing.” And Al Hammond, the author of an economic study on how poor people in developing countries spend their money, notes: “It’s really quite striking. What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.” 
If you build a platform, Berners-Lee has found, people find all kinds of innovative ways to stand on it. What’s to come? He doesn’t know…but he wants to tap into students and other young people and have them help him figure out what should be next.
